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Bluetext Survey Shows How Government Executives Make IT Decisions

Survey Results in Federal Computer Week

Federal agencies can be great customers because they remain some of the biggest spenders and their budgets stay fairly stable even during economic downturns. Yet sales and marketing teams used to marketing to consumer or commercial enterprise customers often find that their efforts fall flat in the government space — wasting everyone’s time in the process.

That’s because talking to the government customer can require a different approach, including the channels used to reach that audience and the messages included. Understanding those needs and preferences can help contractors and feds alike.

We recently surveyed 150 top government executives involved in the decision-making process for IT purchases, to understand directly how they get the information that helps inform their purchasing decisions. The results provide a road map for targeting this audience — and a valuable look in the mirror for agency leaders who wonder if there are better ways to gather the information they need.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT FCW.COM

6 Ways Government Contractors Can Use Innovative Digital Marketing and PR Strategies To Win Business

When it comes to marketing and communications, government contractors and public sector IT providers face a set of unique challenges. For one, the customer base of Federal, state and local decision makers responsible for purchasing technology products and services – ranging from CIOs and CTOs to program managers, IT managers and procurement officers –represents a finite group that can be difficult to reach.

Compounding this predicament is the fact that government contractors must not only market their brand, product and services to these decision makers, but also time these marketing efforts strategically. This means building awareness far enough in advance of a contract award, and then sustaining marketing and PR efforts throughout what can be a multi-year process from pre-RFP to the contract award – and even beyond due to potential contract protests, delays and budgetary obstacles.

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE:
6 Ways Government Contractors Can Use Innovative Digital Marketing and PR Strategies To Win Business

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT FCW.COM

Ok, admit it. Marketing these days feels like high school. The cool kids are throwing around new terms every day. As you sit in meetings, meet with agencies and follow “thought leaders” on Twitter, someone uses a new term and you have no idea what it means but don’t want to raise your hand to admit it. You finally feel confident when someone talks about a responsive website, and then they start talking about adaptive response…UGH!

It’s ok. The web, content marketing, digital, inbound, lead scoring, social…they are all changing so fast it is very hard to keep up.

Don’t despair. Here it is. The “I’m No Dummy Guide to Marketing Lingo.” A list of terms that get thrown around all the time that we all wish we knew.

Go ahead…Print it out…Post it on your door… turn it into your own little study guide. You will feel like the smartest kid in class in no time. And let us know if terms are missing as new ones are emerging every day.

The "I'm No Dummy" Guide to Marketing Lingo from Bluetext

The DC tech startup community has a chip on its shoulder. That’s not a bad thing; it motivates entrepreneurs and area leaders committed to advancing the interests of the DC tech community to fight for respect. This respect can assume many forms, including funding, an available pool of highly educated, skilled workers, or just positive publicity and attention relative to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and other tech hubs that seem to glisten more in the eyes of venture capitalists and industry pontificators.

As I networked and dined at MAVA’s annual holiday luncheon last week and reflected on the week that was in the local tech space, a scene from Jerry Maguire popped into my head. It was when Tom Cruise and Kelly Preston feed each other breakfast in the buff. Ok, that’s not the scene, but figured I’d throw it in there to make sure everyone is paying attention. It was Jerry Maguire racing home after the football game, bearing his soul to his wife, and exclaiming, “Tonight…our little company had a very big night. A very, very big night.” The flurry of venture capital raise announcements by local companies last week in fact represents a very, very big week for the DC tech community.

The three venture capital raises undermined a prevailing but increasingly antiquated notion that technology innovation emerging from the nation’s capital is government-skewed, exclusively b2b or, for lack of a better word, boring. Optoro, a startup that caught my eye approximately five years ago as a presenting company at a MAVA event, announced a $50 million funding raise on December 10^th. The company stood out to me that day because the business model was simple (heck, even I could understand it which is no easy task) and it was clear to everyone in the room what the industry pain point was (retailers were not efficiently and cost-effectively able to sell excess and returned inventory), and that Optoro has developed a very clever way to address it (a cloud-based, multi-channel selling technology enabling retailers to optimally manage their reverse logistics).

The day before Optoro announced its massive funding raise, marketing software firm TrackMaven snagged a $14M Series B round from NEA, Bowery Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and others. TrackMaven is striking a chord with overwhelmed digital marketers seeking products to help better track and act on relevant data related to earned media, SEO, ads, content marketing and social media efforts.

The final venture capital raise last week is a company I’ve been privileged enough to call a client for the past several years – Canvas. The Reston-based company, which raised $9 million, has quickly emerged as the global leader in mobile apps for collecting and sharing business information. Canvas is truly disrupting how work gets done by enabling businesses to replace expensive and inefficient paper forms and processes with customizable mobile apps for smartphones and tablets, with no programming or IT required. There are also now more than 15,000 apps in the Canvas mobile business application store – apps that can easily be downloaded, customized and shared by Canvas’ growing community of partners and subscribers.

Not only do these funding raises reflect the diversity of startups and challenger brands that now call the DC area home, but also strengthens the region’s global position. Canvas’ Jason Ganz reaffirmed as much in his recent blog post that analyzed every startup funding round the last ten years. Among several compelling pieces of data, Ganz calculated that the DC region has 138 funding rounds listed so far in 2014 – making it the 7^th highest region for startup funding globally. For the sake of comparison, there were 52 area funding rounds in 2009 and 157 funding rounds last year.

It was a very, very big week for the Greater Washington technology community, one that holds the promise for even greater activity and growth next year.

My exposure to Israeli technology companies over the past several years has admittedly gravitated towards cyber security, video surveillance and biometric startups like BriefCam, FST21 and others often born out of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or Israeli Military Intelligence. Whether it has been at ASIS or other security industry conferences, I come away impressed with the sophistication of the technology and potential applications for both commercial and government purposes.

One of the reasons the Showcase of Maryland/Israel Business – which took place on November 18^th in Silver Spring, MD – caught my attention is that it extended beyond some of the aforementioned security categories to robotics, e-discovery software, medical equipment, and mobile emergency response solutions. The event was hosted by the Maryland/Israel Development Center, a non-profit organization promoting trade and investment between Maryland and Israeli businesses and research institutions.

In some cases, the companies were Israeli-based and looking to push into the U.S. market more aggressively, while others had Israeli origins but had been operating in Maryland for several years. As someone who has tracked and worked with scores of Maryland technology companies and startups – first as founder of a Maryland Tech PR firm and currently in my role as Partner at Bluetext – it is exciting to see collaboration and efforts by the Maryland Tech community to foster closer ties with Israeli tech firms.

Some of the more provocative demonstrations and companies I spoke with included:

Roboteam – This company designs, develops and manufactures cutting edge, user-oriented, multi-purpose, unmanned platforms and controllers for Defense, Law Enforcement and Public Safety missions. One of its unmanned ground vehicles was on display and operational at the event, where it demonstrated its ability to not only move on flat service but also ascend a podium staircase.

iControl Universal Collaboration Solutions – Collaborative Business Intelligence firm based in Burtonsville, Maryland helping retailers gain unified data insights across its supplier network.

NextNine – Cyber Security firm focused on oil, gas, mining, defense and other critical infrastructure verticals.

RADiFlow – This company provides secure industrial Ethernet solutions for critical infrastructure applications.

Video has become an essential element in nearly every integrated marketing campaign. Whether it’s to highlight a key executive or subject expert, capture a discussion that demonstrates leadership on a topic or issue, or provide a better explanation of a complicated subject, video delivers a strong platform from which to tell a story.

The challenge with video is that it can be of poor quality and doesn’t hold the audience’s attention when not done well. While it may seem simple to set an executive behind a desk and start running the video camera while he or she starts talking, there are a lot of stumbling blocks when taking this easy path. Offices and even conference rooms can be cramped, making it difficult to get the best angles. The lighting is always uneven. Shadows in the wrong places are a constant issue. And if you’re doing a series of video interviews, each office will look and feel different on camera. In addition, sound quality is particularly hard, especially in today’s modern offices where air is constantly moving through the ventilation systems. While often barely audible in person, lavaliere microphones are extremely sensitive and amplify that hidden sound.

A better solution is getting the individuals out of their office and putting them in a controlled setting before a curtain or green screen. This approach offers a number of important advantages for a compelling and quality video experience:

1) The lighting will be consistent across every video. Shadows can be controlled, and office clutter is removed from the scene.
2) Audio can be controlled, with ambient sound kept to a minimum.
3) Backdrops, colors and tones can be chosen to meet the mood of the topic or the intended feel of the interview.
4) Multiple cameras can be more easily used, offering more interesting ways to edit the final piece.
5) Multiple videos in a series can have a similar look and feel, making them look like part of the package rather than random takes shot in different locations.

Bluetext often uses black curtains as well as green screens to achieve the right look for our clients’ videos. Here are a few examples that should get every marketer thinking about a better way to capture executives, thought leaders, experts and customers as part of successful marketing campaigns.

Use the Background to Set the Tone. For the launch of a new program called Smart Degree that enlists adult learners in college courses to complete their degrees, the education services company Nelnet enlisted Bluetext to capture a single mother explaining her challenges in obtaining those college credits. Because this was about those struggling to improve their career and economic status, we chose a heavy black curtain for a serious tone. We shot the video with two cameras, one from the front and a second with a side perspective, to give us room for close-ups and for editing. While we didn’t use an interviewer in the shoot, we had the mother look slightly off-camera to suggest that she was engaged in a conversation explaining her personal challenges. We shot four different takes, and the two-camera shoot made the video more interesting to watch and easier to edit. We added a hint of soft focus to soften the features and tone down the intensity of the lighting.

For a second video in the series, we took a different approach. This time, we were capturing a university executive explaining the value and benefits of the Smart Degree program. We used a green screen and chose an off-white background in post-production. This color selection gave a totally different tone to the video, offering an upbeat perspective on the value of Smart Degree. It also allowed us to decrease the contrast and add warmth to the final product.

Combine a Green Screen and a Backdrop for a Series of Interviews. For a campaign aimed at the Federal market, NetApp and Thundercat asked for a series of five experts to discuss ways for agencies to consolidate their data centers for more efficiency and to meet government mandates. We created a network interview environment, emulating Charlie Rose and the way he uses a dark studio to impart a sense of gravity and weight to his interviews.

Using a long black curtain to absorb light and give a sense of “infinity” to the scene, for each interview we placed the expert at the far corner of a conference table and focused one camera slightly off-center at their face. I played the role of the interviewer, lofting broad questions that allowed them to talk about the subject. The second camera was slightly over my shoulder, setting up the interview scene. We also captured long-shots of the two of us talking before the interview began. To introduce each segment, we enlisted the services of a well-known journalist and influencer in the government technology space. We placed him before a green screen to make the short introductions, and then overlaid those shots onto the interview long-shots. The effect is as if the he were in the studio with us.

This approach serves several purposes. First, it allows each of the interviews to have the same look and feel so they don’t seem random or disjointed. Second, the black curtains bring a professional tone to the videos. And third, the interview style and introduction make the segments more interesting and engaging to the audience.

Try Something Different to Keep the Audience Engaged. Technology giants McAfee and Intel were looking for a more interesting way to provide video lectures when highlighting their new solutions. As an alternative to capturing their experts behind a podium, we created an entirely different look and feel. We captured each expert in front of a green screen as if they were speaking before a large audience. A still of the first frame of each video was captured and placed inside a digitally-created, 3-D modeled “Agency of the Future.”

As the visitor to the site moves around the virtual building, they can select from each of the discussions by clicking on the still image. That image immediately comes to life as the video begins to play, and simulates a live presentation. As an added feature, we also placed the video inside a larger monitor screen in each video scene next to the speaker, similar to how jumbo screens are used in large auditoriums. That added feature gives visual interest and a touch of reality to a virtual environment. The Agency of the Future has been a huge success for Intel and McAfee, with visitors staying on site far longer than other campaigns they had run.

Video should be interesting, engaging and compelling to be effective. Understanding the options and the value of backdrops, curtains and green screens can make the difference between having your customers take notice and losing their interest.

2014 has been a year of amazing changes in the world of marketing, where micro-targeting via social platforms is now mainstream, banner ads are becoming passe, personalized content is in, native and sponsored ads are growing in popularity, video is getting shorter, and a wide range of other evolutionary marketing trends are exploding on the scene–all designed to help companies and organizations identify and reach their customers. And guess what? The sky hasn’t fallen, at least not yet. But looking at 2014 is almost, well, old news. As fast as digital transformation has hit us this year, it will move that much faster next year. So we at Bluetext thought this would be a good time to start looking ahead to 2015. We asked a wide range of senior marketing executives–including technology leaders, information services providers, financial industry start-ups, and even top trade associations–to gaze into their crystal balls and share with us their Big Bet for 2015. We’ve compiled those below, and think you’ll find their insight provocative and challenging.

BET #1. PREDICTIVE MODELING

by NICK PANAYI of CSC Director, Global Brand & Digital Marketing

As we look forward to next year and beyond, I can tell you honestly that the “next big thing” in marketing has never been clearer to me. What I believe will separate good marketers from exceptional ones is the exploding field of predictive intelligence.

We all have abundant data now. And we all have real-time marketing dashboards that act as a high-definition rear-view mirror of our customers’ digital footprints. That’s table stakes. What gets real interesting moving forward is the ability to leverage increasingly powerful predictive modeling tools to peer into the future and optimize your marketing efforts before they even start! Predictive modeling allows you to extract maximum value from the investments you already made in your digital ecosystem and the knowledge you’ve gathered about your customers’ digital body language…..

Read more about Predictive Modeling, and what top executives from organizations such as Georgetown University, NetApp, and others think is in store for 2015 by registering below.

Fill out my online form.

Standing out in a sea of 400 of the world’s leading cyber security vendors and startups is no easy feat. Each year, more than 28,000 cyber professionals swarm to the RSA Conference North America to experience the latest and greatest of what the industry has to offer.

For emerging and even established cyber security vendors, few opportunities like RSA exist where so many existing and potential customers are accessible. PR and marketing planning for RSA begins months before the event itself, and can be expansive in nature – ranging from message development and creating innovative, dedicated landing pages to booking and providing on-site support for press and analyst briefings.

Capturing the attention of decision makers, press and analysts at RSA 2015 will be no easy feat. Reporters and analysts are bombarded with hundreds of briefing requests, often reserving 1×1 slots for familiar names with significant announcements to make. That said, success is possible and there are strategies that do work. Here are 5 tips for generating buzz and briefings at RSA 2015.

Don’t wait until RSA pitch to connect with reporters

Your firm may have relationships with some reporters and analysts, and lack them with others. Fair or not, reporters are going to pay more attention to emails from PR practitioners they know – particularly when it comes to sifting through 200-300 conference meeting requests. In one of his parting columns for Forbes, A Day In The Life Of A Tech Reporter’s Email Inbox, contributor J.J. Calao broke down one day’s worth of emails. Of the 34 PR story pitch emails that day, he responded to six of them – and he personally knew five of the six he responded to and did not respond to 29 pitches from publicists he didn’t know.

The point is this: many PR professionals worry about reaching out to reporters they don’t have strong relationships with before the RSA pitch – thinking it is better to wait until they have “big news” to get their attention. The problem is that your news probably isn’t as big as you think, and if you wait until the moment when a reporter is receiving the highest volume of pitches they get all year to try and break through, you will be out of luck.

Instead, find a way to get on the radar of influencers before the RSA pitch to make a connection. This could be as simple as tweeting the reporter in response to a recent article they have written, or alerting the reporter to new cyber security research. It is hard enough to try, in a single brief email or phone pitch, to explain what your company does and then explain any news announcement. Use a pre-RSA pitch strategy to expose the reporter or analyst to your brand and where you fit into the cyber security ecosystem. Then, the RSA pitch can cut right to the chase on news being announced.

Understand what to announce

There are reporters at RSA who will conceivably be interested in new products and writing product round-ups. But to pitch reporters who have, understandably, grown cynical about new product proclamations, it is very risky to have this be the anchor of your outreach strategy. At the same time, reporters are not interested in hearing your CEO’s “perspectives on top cyber threats” or “insights into the next vulnerability that will be exploited by cyber criminals.”

What reporters may be interested in is provocative new research your firm has conducted that supports any trend position you are staking out or that is being overlooked in the current cyber conversation; or customer case studies/customer-based research that attaches real-world examples to evolving trends. You can announce products at RSA, but the product story must fit into a broader narrative that is supported by data and/or customers.

Don’t go it alone

The limited amount of time reporters and analysts now have for 1×1 meetings at RSA borders on the comical, as the time windows have shrunk to as little as 15-20 minutes. I can’t even run through what I had for breakfast in 15 minutes let alone have a meaningful conversation that a reporter will remember at the end of a day full of 32 quarter-hour briefings.

Make the reporter’s life easier by killing two or three birds with one stone. Is your cyber security product part of a broader suite with partner solutions that a customer is using? If so, coordinate a single plan of attack with these partners that will add greater weight and simplify the story. Instead of a reporter getting a similar, overlapping pitch from three vendors, they get one tight, singular pitch that ties everything together. This approach is particularly valuable for emerging cyber brands that partner with a more established brand with established inroads to key reporters.

Working with partners, you can also set up landing pages in advance of RSA and direct influencers to key information on that site. This can whet the appetite of influencers and drive momentum into the conference.

Research Conference Product/Company Awards

RSA has meaningful award and innovation programs, such as the RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox Program, that offer a credibility check when communicating with customer decision makers, partners, press and analyst. These award deadlines are several weeks in advance of the conference and require the client to have sufficient advanced knowledge it will be announcing a new product at the show.

Engage on social if not in-person

For cyber security reporters and analysts you are not able to connect with in person at conferences, engage on Twitter to in advance of and during RSA to identify what is capturing their interest. Finding a key reporter at a large conference is akin to the proverbial needle in the haystack. You can increase your chances by following these influencers on Twitter, and perhaps one might post that they are headed into a particular panel session – thus shrinking that haystack considerably.

For everyone at RSA, there are also hundreds of others who want to attend but cannot for budget, schedule and myriad other reasons. Use your presence at RSA to deliver on-the-ground intel from sessions, themes, and demos, and promote that you will be doing this in advance of the Conference.

In the ever changing world of digital marketing the phrases we hear from our clients more and more are around the “Customer Journey” and achieving pinnacle SEO success for their brands.

In order to address this lets first break down the two ingredients:

Search Engine Optimization Best Practices:

Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
Categorize Keyword Research
Find Gaps and Opportunities
Define Competitors
Learn From Your Competitors
Customize an SEO Strategy & Recommendations
Create must-have SEO Recommendations
Prioritize and summarize

Customer Journey Best Practices:

These are five points any company contemplating, planning, or already undertaking a customer journey initiative should consider:

Define the Behavioral Stages
Align Customer Goals with the Stages
Plot Out The Touch Points
Determine If Your Customers Are Achieving Their Goals
Create Recommendations for Change

Now that you have your SEO and Customer Journey Best Practices in place, here is your roadmap to creating an SEO Customer Journey:

1) Create your own customer journey map.

2) On your map, identify the specific points at which a user is conducting one of the three types of search queries (navigational, transactional, or informational).

3) Make a list of keywords/queries for each point in the customer journey that involves a specific query type.

4) Connect each keyword to a specific method of SEO strategy.

Now, take those keywords and plug them into your SEO strategy. How? Let’s take one keyword from the above example — “how much storage can I afford?” Here’s what you might do:

1) Create a page on the website

2) Page title: “How much storage can I afford? | Storage Planning”

3) H1: “How much storage can my business afford?”

4) Article: Discuss answers to this question in the article, and provide a clear Call to Action (CTA) at the end.

5) Create a series of four evergreen blog articles that deal with this question. Use this keyword and any long tail variations of ”how much storage can I afford?”

6) Create an infographic that answers the question “”how much storage can I afford?”

7) Interview several experts on storage affordability, and post a video series on YouTube.

Need help with your digital marketing, search engine optimization, user experience design, and/or customer journey consulting, please contact us.

Today CSC launched the 2.0 version of its Digital Briefing Center. CSC’s Digital Briefing Center is where customers, partners and prospects from across the globe can come to learn more about the key technology conversations and shifts CSC is driving into the market.

The center is driven with immersive 3D video technology that is completely interactive through html 5 overlays throughout the user journey.

Following launch, Bluetext’s collaborative creation with CSC’s Digital Marketing team became the top performing component of the csc.com global web presence, a huge feat for a Fortune 500 corporation.

Version 2.0 features new capabilities spanning:

Multi-floor scalability
Triple screen experience
Dynamic social media integration
Triggered infographic visualizations synched with briefing videos
Chaptered video interactivity

The following video of CSC’s head of global brand and digital marketing talks about this project: